The Educated Marketer

Why Your Website Visitors Aren’t Converting

Do you ever feel like you are doing everything right in your inbound marketing campaign but you’re just not seeing the results you’d expected?

Your higher education institution is hip to the content marketing game. You know how to build a winning website and blog and how to capture attention via social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. You may have a million unique visitors a month, but definitely not a million prospective applicants a month.

Here’s what you are doing wrong:

You aren’t providing enough direction for your visitors

Picture this, your prospective student does a search for a college that specializes in their intended area of study. Your institution shows up in the organic search results. They click on the link and arrive at your website. They scroll around for a bit and find some useful information but they lose interest and return to their search results.

It may be a no brainer that if a student wants more information, they will seek it out on your site. But many first-time visitors to a website are merely collecting information and if you aren’t proactive about providing useful links for a first-time visitor, you may lose them completely.

You need to provide clear direction on your homepage for both new and returning visitors. A clear call-to-action button on your page above the fold is a great way to invite students to learn more. Are you able to provide a useful content offer in exchange for their email? Even better!

Your website isn’t optimized for mobile users

This is a BIG one. According to Smart Insights, 80% of internet users own a smartphone. And the number of prospective students that visit on their mobile devices is likely higher than those who access your website via traditional computer. A recent Pew Research study showed that nearly 94% of teens with smartphones go online daily or more often.

Mobile optimized sites have larger text, single call-to-action buttons and usually feature images and videos to capture your audience’s attention.

We live in an extremely impatient world. According to the Huffington Post, 57% of web users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. There are many reasons a website can be running slow—too many RSS feeds, images that are too large and too many installed modules on your site are a few.

According to a recent Hubspot Survey, companies with at least thirty landing pages on their website generated 7x more leads than those with less. It makes sense—provide more resources and thus landing pages on your website and your visitors will stay longer.

Make sure your website’s navigation is intuitive to visitors. Business2community.com suggests having a bottom or top nav bar that are logical and well ordered. Also make sure your website has pages that convey necessary information, without providing so much information you risk confusing your prospective students. Think baby steps. One page logically leads to another.

Remember, getting your visitors to stick around longer is just the first step. Getting their interest long enough to capture their information is extremely important, but the next step—effectively nurturing your leads from website visitors into applicants will take time and effort. But using these suggestions, hopefully you can get more visitors past that first hurdle!

See if you're doing what it takes to reach enrollment goals with our free Inbound Marketing checklist.